FORT WAYNE, Ind.— John Licato, assistant professor of computer science at Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW), is a recipient of a 2016 Air Force Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) Award for research in artificial intelligence and robotics.

His proposal, “Active Formalization Through Analogico-Deductive Reasoning,” was funded for $360,000 over a three-year period.

“This grant not only raises the level of our engineering program, it also provides a great opportunity for the students to become involved in cutting-edge research with outstanding faculty,” said Beomjin Kim, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science.

Licato runs the Analogical Constructivism and Reasoning Lab (ACoRL) at IPFW. His research will work on giving robots flexibility in how they understand instructions. The grant's funds will support research in the ACoRL Lab.

“This project will be studying active formalization; that is, how can we create robots that can reason beyond the formalizations they are initially given,” said Licato. “Artificially intelligent systems are often given a set of rules and symbols to reason over. But human beings seem to have an ability to think about those symbols, understand the meaning behind those symbols, and create new ones, often going beyond the rules and symbols they were given.”

To solve the problem, he is developing techniques such as analogico-deductive reasoning and a computational implementation of Rudolf Carnap's explication.